Thus spoke Bernhard Dernburg, the German left-liberal ex-banker and new head of the Foreign Ministry's Colonial Office (Reichskolonialabteilung, hereafter RKAb) in January 1907. He gave this speech in front of like-minded colonial enthusiasts shortly before the upcoming national parliamentary elections in Germany. In May 1907, Dernburg would move even further up the career ladder and become state secretary of the newly created Colonial Department (Reichskolonialamt, hereafter RKA).Footnote ¹

Present-day readers, German and American, are startled by Dernburg labeling the expansion of the fledgling American republic across the continent a “colonial endeavor,” analogous to nineteenth-century European imperialism, no less. Even more surprising from a contemporary perspective, however, is that Dernburg did not intend his analysis to be a criticism, not even his reference to the “annihilation” of Amerindians. Dernburg abhorred brutal actions taken against native peoples by European or American colonizers. Yet there could be, in his words, “no doubt” that the Indians’ vanishing had ultimately been a natural development and not the result of preconceived extermination strategies. Instead, seeing the United States as the biggest colonial venture in the world recommended America both for close scrutiny and for emulation in Germany's only settler colony, South-West Africa (present-day Namibia, hereafter GSWA) – a view that Dernburg adhered to diligently while in office, and that prompted him to travel the United States extensively in order see for himself how American models could be applied in the German colonial context.Footnote ²

In 1907, these ideas were not new. During a speech at a meeting of the German National Liberal Party (NLP) in September of 1884, the year in which Germany began to acquire colonies, Friedrich Ratzel, an influential geographer and one of Imperial Germany's most fervent proponents of overseas expansion, remarked that

In no uncertain terms, Ratzel described American westward expansion as settler colonialism and used the impossibility of creating a “New Germany” on American soil, represented positively with the image of refined, high-quality white bread, as an argument for German imperialist endeavors in Africa. It was no coincidence that the poorer-quality black bread Ratzel used as his metaphor to depict Africa included an adjective often descriptive of race, a clear reminder that colonial expansion and the topics of race (and race control) went hand in hand.Footnote ³

Ratzel and Dernburg believed that the United States in general and American westward expansion in particular were exemplary for German colonization efforts. This essay argues that these perceptions, though not uncontested, were so widely shared in the early years of the twentieth century that during and after Lothar von Trotha's murderous campaign (1904–7) against the Herero and the Nama in German South-West Africa, colonial administrators and proponents of colonialism in both GSWA and the German mainland viewed American westward expansion and Indian policies as worthy of emulation in Germany's only settler colony.

By 1914, many Germans were familiar with representations of America as a nation destined to grow, and in doing so to educate, dominate, and, sometimes, exterminate other races. Many German imperialists, scholars, and other writers therefore viewed the extinction of Amerindians at the very least as inevitable, and some even as necessary. Over the course of the nineteenth century, German proponents of colonialism increasingly identified the United States as an exemplary, yet unexceptional, empire. In other words, they saw American expansionism and racial policies as models that colonizers could replicate elsewhere in the world—in particular in German South-West Africa. Moreover, German observers attributed the success of America's westward expansion to laissez-faire principles and the US's liberal political system. These reflections made American colonization practices especially attractive for liberal German expansionists. Because of the impressive growth and developing world-power status of the United States, the American model transcended the sphere of German political liberalism and was also viewed as commendable by colonial enthusiasts from nationalist and conservative backgrounds. Even they, however, acknowledged that liberal, laissez-faire attitudes underwrote America's successful expansionism in the most powerful way.Footnote ⁴

NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN COLONIAL DISCOURSE, INDIANS, AND AMERICAN EXPANSION

This essay seeks to fill several gaps in the existing research. Scholars, among them most recently David Blackbourn, have at least in passing pointed out the importance of American frontier imagery for Nazi imperialism in Eastern Europe. In contrast, the significance of the American frontier and American westward expansion within nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German colonial discourse has so far gone largely unnoticed. In addition, scholars have paid little attention to the importance of American examples for the actions of German colonizers in GSWA and the presence of “America” in domestic debates surrounding this colony. Of all German colonies, only South-West Africa had a settler population worth mentioning. As a result, the settlement of the American West was viewed to be especially relevant for GSWA, whereas it had little significance for Germany's other colonies. Finally, while there exists a broad literature on the popularity of romanticized images of American Indians in Germany, the important role played by “ignoble savage” perceptions of Amerindians in debates linked to German expansionism has garnered little scholarly interest.Footnote ⁵

Using the popularity of Karl May's western novels in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany as a starting ground, Susanne Zantop has argued that from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century and beyond “enthusiasm for things Indian . . . has particularly flourished in the German lands.” For a variety of political, social, and cultural reasons – for example the craving for political freedom, or a sense of inadequacy vis-à-vis France or Great Britain – Germans, much more so than other Europeans, empathized, sympathized, and identified with American Indians. Historian H. Glenn Penny, who has traced the German fascination with Native Americans from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth, reinforces Zantop's assessment.Footnote ⁶

No doubt, romanticized images of Native Americans were fashionable in late nineteenth-century Germany. After the empire's founding in 1871, a national mass market for cheap and widely available publications emerged and Indian fiction became increasingly popular. Yet the fact that romanticized views of Native Americans were stock features of widely sold pulp westerns does not tell us whether nineteenth-century Germans were more or less fascinated by Indians than were other Europeans. The anthropologist Christian Feest has argued that German perceptions of Native Americans should be viewed against a European backdrop. Feest's objections to nationally exclusive interpretations of German “Indianthusiasm” are underscored by Harry Liebersohn's study of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French and German perceptions of Native Americans. While Liebersohn's account focuses on positive images of Native Americans, his book demonstrates how views of Indians functioned in similar fashion in both French and German discourses about Europe's aristocracy during the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷

Nonetheless, Karl May was widely read in early twentieth-century Germany and his popularity thus raises a number of questions. Does May's attractiveness for (mostly male) teenagers in (very) late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany tell us anything about his overall cultural impact? Moreover, even if May himself was not politically active on behalf of Native Americans and other aboriginals worldwide (he was not), perhaps his readers were? Regarding these questions, Jeffrey L. Sammons, one of the most prominent in a long line of literary scholars dealing with Karl May, believes “that the [May] phenomenon escapes final analysis, because it is over-determined and, perhaps, to some degree accidental. I draw no conclusion about the ‘German mind’ from it.”Footnote ⁸

There exist widely differing opinions both regarding Karl May's influence on his German readers and concerning how expressive he was of fin de siècle German attitudes towards Native Americans, with Sammons representing one end of the spectrum, and Zantop the other. Debates about May's sway over his readers, or about the importance of romanticized images of Native Americans for Germans, help us to understand the colonial imaginary in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. They also provide vital elements of this study's social, cultural, and historical backstory. However, the subjects of the following analysis, among them Dernburg, Hermann Müller, Paul Rohrbach, and Theodor Leutwein, were unaffected both by May and by the general German enthusiasm for American Indians. This study thus demonstrates that romanticized perceptions were by no means the only perspectives on Amerindians that can be located in Germany during this period. Influential antithetical views existed. Because of their explicitly pro-expansionist overtones, these ignoble-savage perceptions of Indians belonged to transnational discussions surrounding the subject of settler colonialism and existed separately from romanticized images of Native Americans.Footnote ⁹

Germans, just like Americans, had been holding pro-expansionist and at times exterminatory attitudes vis-à-vis Native Americans ever since the late eighteenth century. German immigrants moved westward along with Americans and other Europeans, embracing negative frontier attitudes towards Indians, which then found their way back to Germany. In nineteenth-century American debates about the continent's native peoples, “ignoble-savage” takes on Indians easily coexisted with popular “noble-savage” perceptions. After all, James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans was selling very well when Lewis Cass, Andrew Jackson's secretary of war, published his infamous “Indian removal” essay in 1831, or when, half a century later, Theodore Roosevelt stated, “I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” Because the settlement of “the West” was not only a nationally American enterprise but also a transatlantic one that included many first-generation European settlers, German deliberations about Native Americans displayed similarly dual characteristics.Footnote ¹⁰

Viewed from the perspective of historians of the American West, Karl May therefore does not so much appear to be particularly German as European, or even transatlantic: although possibly the most successful of them all, he was merely one of a number of popular nineteenth-century authors writing novels about the “Wild West,” like James Fenimore Cooper, the French Gustave Aimard (who, as historian Ray Allen Billington recounts, could only keep up with the demand for his books by publishing one a month), or the Englishman Percy St John.Footnote ¹¹

Once the nineteenth-century German fascination with Native Americans is approached not as a national peculiarity but rather as a transnational regularity, the question of the role and place of negative assessments of Amerindians within German discussions of America deserves close scrutiny. By the last third of the nineteenth century, Germans had long been discussing Indians within the context of American and European colonial expansion and in so doing had often displayed little sympathy for America's indigenous population. Throughout the nineteenth century negative perceptions of Native Americans were part of discussions about the geopolitical role of the progressively more important United States. This debate was closely linked to ideas about the position of the German lands and, after 1871, that of the German Empire in a world increasingly shaped by European imperialism.

The “ignoble-native” topos had a clear function within the broader context of German imperialist aspirations. If the successful acquisition of territory in North America by nations like the United States, or Great Britain (before 1776), had always been connected with encountering and controlling aboriginal peoples, and sometimes with their demise, German colonizers did well to take a close look at native policies in North America. Instead of viewing themselves as better colonizers than other Europeans or North Americans, many German imperialists accepted the Anglo-American colonial experience as normative and urged their compatriots to follow the examples set by English-speaking colonizers in America and elsewhere. The links between German perceptions of the American frontier and German debates about what to do in GSWA indicate that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German imperialism was embedded in a transnational network of intellectual and practical processes of exchange. This transatlantic set of connections was by no means solely focused on the United States, yet within this framework America played an important and so far largely ignored role.Footnote ¹²

THE GLOBALIZATION OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

During the first half of the nineteenth century, intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic believed America to be different from the Old World. In Europe, men like G. W. F. Hegel and Alexis de Tocqueville arrived at this conclusion precisely because of the existence of the American frontier. Hegel presented the idea of American exceptionalism in a nutshell when he argued that “North America will be comparable to Europe only after the measureless space which this country affords is filled.” Tocqueville held similar beliefs, positing that “God himself gave them [the Americans] the means of remaining equal and free, by placing them on a boundless continent.” Anticipating, as we will see, some of Friedrich Ratzel's and Carl Peters's arguments, Tocqueville actually believed America to be a model for French Algeria. Despite the fact that Tocqueville felt sincere regret when he witnessed Indian removal, he never generally indicted American expansion. In Tocqueville's view, France's prestige and authority would increasingly rely on colonial possessions. As a result, he deemed “a wide range of colonial actions” to be justified.Footnote ¹³

Especially after 1850, individual travelers and members of the German scientific community noted that settlers along the American frontier did indeed implement “a wide range of colonial actions” that resulted in twin processes of expansion and extinction. While white Americans and Europeans settled more and more territory, America's indigenous peoples disappeared. This occurrence linked the American frontier to other areas colonized by Europeans, like Australia and Africa. German perceptions of “vanishing Indians” therefore normalized and globalized the American experience, because they challenged two core assumptions of the idea of US exceptionalism: the distinctiveness of the American frontier, and the benign uniqueness of the United States. For many German observers of the US during the second half of the nineteenth century, America's frontier was extremely fascinating, but it was not a national singularity and not exceptional. Instead, it was an example of a global regularity. This was a good thing: because the US was a regular colonial empire – in Dernburg's words, the “biggest” the world had ever known – its remarkably successful expansionist policies could (and should) be emulated in other colonial settings.Footnote ¹⁴

EXPANSION AND EMPIRE: INDIANS, AMERICA, AND GERMAN COLONIAL DISCOURSE AFTER 1866

In 1869, two years before the unification of Germany under Prussian hegemony, Das Ausland, a scientific journal edited by the Darwinist geographer Oscar Peschel, reviewed the latest book by the German traveler and popular novelist Friedrich Gerstäcker. Peschel's review praised all of Gerstäcker's books for delivering “vivid” descriptions of life in America. Speaking about Indians, Gerstäcker had observed in one of his earlier works, “They go down the path that all wild peoples follow . . . they all march inevitably towards their certain doom.” Gerstäcker realized the injustice inherent in this development but did not see an alternative to it, “because civilization spreads out further and further and cannot be held back.” For him, European expansion was “unavoidable,” and the victims of this global process were to be pitied but could not be helped.Footnote ¹⁵

Like Gerstäcker, Peschel accepted the inevitability of European and white American expansion. Gerstäcker's depictions of this process were one of the reasons why Peschel promoted the former's publications. Peschel thus endorsed works both by members of the scientific community and by popular writers such as Gerstäcker. Under his guidance, Das Ausland therefore occupied a key position when it came to disseminating information in mid-nineteenth-century Germany on the American frontier and on other regions colonized by Europeans. Das Ausland's first issue appeared in 1828 and the journal's publication ceased almost exactly seventy-five years later. Its focus and profile reflected the growing self-confidence of the German scientific community during the nineteenth century. Das Ausland's reports and articles testify to the increasing importance of “hot” new scientific fields and disciplines throughout the second half of the 1800s in Germany, for example ethnography, biology, and geography. Because of its editors’ prestige, Das Ausland was among the most important and well-respected popular-scientific publications in nineteenth-century Germany.Footnote ¹⁶

The elite group of the journal's editors consisted of the above-mentioned Peschel, the ethnographer Friedrich Hellwald and Friedrich Ratzel—all towering presences in their respective academic fields, and all proponents of applying Darwinist approaches to their disciplines. Moreover, they and other scientists believed Darwinist principles to be all-purpose solutions for mankind's problems: Darwinism could be used in order to judge human behavior, to ground scientifically (as opposed to religiously or metaphysically) ethics and morality, and, last but not least, to understand the underlying rules of domestic and international politics. Unsurprisingly, these men therefore also interpreted and advocated German, European, and (white) American expansion against a Darwinist backdrop. The evolutionary principle was a scientific verity; its workings had to be accepted, with or without regret. These sentiments are summed up in this passage by Friedrich Hellwald:

According to Das Ausland's editors Peschel, Hellwald, and Ratzel, Darwinist science had enormous ethical, moral, and therefore political implications. The journal thus took it upon itself to also analyze the state of politics and civilization around the globe. Das Ausland therefore purposefully infused political commentary with the aura of scientific certainty. Its editorials lent themselves easily to applying social Darwinist doctrine to world affairs in general, and European and American colonial expansion in particular. In an 1860 article, Peschel commented that American expansion had always been accompanied by massacres, “which even today are still being committed by European pioneers, fur traders, and scalp hunters on the nearside and (in even worse fashion) the farside of the Rocky Mountains.” Eventually, according to Peschel, this process would lead to the “disappearance” of all indigenous peoples in many parts of the globe. Peschel also praised the construction of a transcontinental railway line that would “cut the red man's lifeline and that of the big bison herds.” For Peschel, this development was no reason to pity Native Americans: “We are not among those who believe the extermination of an ancient human race to be a crime committed by American society.”Footnote ¹⁸

A year after Peschel had voiced these thoughts, the Darwinist biologist Ernst Haeckel published the first edition of his massively popular Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Natural History of Creation). In it, Haeckel gave his own explanation of the demise of Native Americans and other non-white races around the globe. He viewed the exterminatory consequences of European and white North American colonial expansion as a simple biological necessity: “While the European tribes are spreading out all over the world, others are perishing . . . This holds especially true for the redskins in America.” Haeckel's popularity in Germany demonstrates not only that pitiless views of Amerindians existed side by side with empathetic ones, but also that they were read by a broad public.Footnote ¹⁹

Haeckel and Peschel made abundantly clear that sympathy for the disappearance of “weaker” human races was unnecessary. Reports about Native Americans in popular German magazines like Die Gartenlaube (The Gazebo), which had a circulation of 380,000 copies at its peak in 1876, could at times display a smug faith in white European superiority that went even further than the racialized views of these two scientists. Die Gartenlaube's feature on the battle at Little Big Horn in 1876 thus expressed the hope that it would be “one of the first tasks of the republic during the second century of its existence to cleanse the lands from the Indian pest that has already . . . claimed so many thousands of precious human lives.” In fact, despite the popularity of Karl May's “noble-savage” hero Winnetou, supposedly an Apache chief, late nineteenth-century ethnographic publications consistently offered negative representations of the Apache. Friedrich Hellwald's Amerika in Wort und Bild (America in Word and Image) hence stated that the Apache's

Rudolf Cronau, who had traveled frequently in the United States and whose reports were printed in Die Gartenlaube, made similar statements about this southwestern tribe. Cronau described the Apache as “cruel as hyenas.” In his view, they were “a veritable scourge” for Arizona and New Mexico.”Footnote ²⁰

Such statements, which implied that the undeserving Apache had too much land at their disposal, were by no means particularly German. According to historian Ray Billington, they instead reiterated especially British and Scandinavian outlooks on Native Americans, because these European countries and regions (just like the German lands) had contributed “so largely to the immigrant stream then flowing toward the frontiers.” They also echoed American frontier attitudes, of course. For example, in 1851, California's first civilian United States governor, Peter Burnett, publicly declared “that a war of extermination will continue to be waged . . . until the Indian race becomes extinct,” and warned that what he called “the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.” In the end, Peschel's and Haeckel's evaluation of the ultimate fate of Native Americans was little more than a reflection of this sentiment, especially given that Das Ausland had keenly followed the American debate about what to do with the continent's native peoples ever since the journal had published Lewis Cass's Indian removal essay in 1831. Die Gartenlaube's feature on the necessity to “cleanse” the West of the Apache also echoed American frontier viewpoints. As a “solution” to the perceived “Apache problem” in 1864 the Arizona Miner, a weekly newspaper based in Prescott, Arizona, had declared that “Extermination is our only hope, and the sooner the better.” Twelve years later, Die Gartenlaube merely presented similarly cruel positions to a broad, non-academic German audience.Footnote ²¹

German colonialists were impressed by American expansionism and envied the United States for the easily available (“empty”) lands in “the West.” In fact, Friedrich Ratzel was so impressed that he changed his career after visiting the United States as a journalist in 1874–5. Back in Germany, Ratzel immersed himself in the new scientific field of geography and in 1886 became professor at the University of Leipzig. In his first book, a travelogue entitled Sketches of Urban and Cultural Life in North America (1876), his fascination with both the question of race control and the immense space available for the westward expansion of the United States was already clearly apparent, and America featured prominently in most of his subsequent publications. In the early 1890s, Ratzel's impressions of and thoughts on American expansion helped him to develop his concept of geopolitics. This intellectual development also found expression in his praise for Fredrick Jackson Turner's “frontier thesis,” although unlike the historian Turner, the geographer Ratzel believed that the frontier was not an exclusively American but rather a global phenomenon. Frontiers were places where indigenous peoples were pushed aside by white settlers. In his widely read Political Geography (1897), Ratzel therefore linked the perceived problem of racial conflict with his views on modern agricultural developments and territorial expansion. In 1901, Ratzel subsumed many of the questions he had already addressed in his Political Geography under the phrase “living space” (Lebensraum), a scientific premise that described the space needed to sustain a species, or a people, and posited that, in order to survive, plants, animals, and nations had to expand their living space, by migration, colonization, and/or conquest.Footnote ²²

Ratzel's conviction that the need for expansion could be scientifically proven also shaped his politics. During a speech at a meeting of the National Liberal Party in Munich in September of 1884, he thus argued for German overseas expansion and criticized “colonial skeptics.” He also made clear that North America was the place most ideally suited for European colonization, although Germany never had the opportunity to partake in the continent's settlement as a nation state. In addition, Ratzel backed his call for German overseas expansion by arguing that his and the National Liberal Party's support for colonial expansion (Kolonialpolitik) was directly linked to notions that had been discussed by the revolutionary National Assembly in Frankfurt in 1848–9. Back then, as he recounted, liberal revolutionaries had stipulated that the (still to be established) German national government should protect international commerce and emigration. Ratzel clearly believed that the German Empire's colonial endeavors in 1884 fulfilled demands voiced by liberal revolutionaries thirty-six years earlier.Footnote ²³

According to historian Woodruff D. Smith, Ratzel “turned decisively to the right” in the mid-1870s. Yet as late as 1884, Ratzel nevertheless had faith in political tenets that dated back to German political liberalism's revolutionary past. Moreover, his affirmative references to Germany's failed liberal revolution also pointed towards the important role his positive views of the US's liberal political system played for the premises of his Political Geography. For Ratzel, “space” shaped character. In 1893 he therefore argued that the ready availability of land for the ever-expanding United States had beneficial effects for Americans as individuals and for the stability of their republican government.Footnote ²⁴

Ratzel was well aware of the attractiveness of such a reading of American history in Imperial Germany. After 1884, colonialism became appealing to various sociopolitical groups: progressive liberals like Max Weber and Friedrich Naumann argued for the necessity of expansionist “great politics” because Germany's global engagement would educate its citizenry at home. Conservatives and right-wing liberals like Johann von Miquel or to a lesser extent Friedrich Meinecke hoped for the opposite. They believed colonialism would have a stabilizing steam-valve effect, as settler colonies would minimize domestic pressures for social change. Ratzel's depiction of America and his connected colonialist arguments catered to all of these diverse political perspectives. Moreover, despite his nationalist tendencies, Ratzel's liberalism remained clearly apparent when he wrote about the United States. For him, as for other right-leaning German liberals, liberal political systems were supposed to provide individuals with the necessary protection to successfully engage in their particular entrepreneurial endeavors. Despite its autocratic government, the German Empire was therefore such a system (at least in the eyes of the NLP's members), as it respected and protected its citizens’ private spheres and economic interests.Footnote ²⁶

According to Ratzel, the white settlement of North America was the best example for both why and how Germans should engage in policies of colonial expansion. The United States demonstrated that the availability of land for settlement stabilized domestic politics. In addition, America's liberal (i.e. barely regulated) expansionism explained why the Anglo-American colonization of North America had been triumphant while French efforts had failed, although they had

Here, again, Ratzel in fact sounded eerily similar to Tocqueville, who regretted that the French in North America “had failed to plant the roots of civilization” while the English, because of their laissez-faire attitude towards their colonists, had succeeded. A multitude of decentralized Indian policies carried out independently by numerous white pioneers had thus resulted in the permanent Anglo-American settlement of most of North America.Footnote ²⁷

This liberal pattern of lasting expansion had first been practiced in North America. During the late nineteenth century it was being repeated on a global scale. Europeans, especially the British and the Germans, valued “the soil” more highly than native peoples in North America or Africa. According to Ratzel's The State and Its Soil (1896),

Given Imperial Germany's overseas expansion after 1884, the process of spatially expanding states that Ratzel described was well anchored in German political reality. By 1901, when Ratzel published Der Lebensraum, South-West Africa had become Germany's most populous dependency abroad.Footnote ²⁸

During the 1890s, Ratzel's French colleague Camille Vallaux accused him of merely cloaking German imperialist aspirations in scientific garments. The tensions between France and the German Empire after 1871 explain Vallaux's concerns about the scientific validity of Ratzel's work. However, Ratzel received an entirely different reception on the other side of the Atlantic. The Harvard professor Nathaniel S. Shaler introduced Ratzel's ideas to American readers in his Nature and Man in America, coupling them with his own brand of extreme scientific racism that tempted him to propose a variety of resolutions to America's “ethnic questions,” among them eugenic control and immigration restriction. In fact, during the 1890s, Ratzel's ideas found a second home among Harvard geologists and geographers. Shaler was steeped in them, and so were William Morris Davis and Isaiah Bowman. Bowman's influence, especially, was not limited to academic circles. During the first half of the twentieth century, his views shaped American foreign-policy objectives more than once.Footnote ²⁹

The most important American admirer of Ratzel, however, was the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, whose famous “frontier thesis” posited that American westward expansion, which had officially come to an end in the early 1890s, had made the US exceptional. Turner quoted the German geographer at length in his 1896 paper “The West as a Field for Historical Study,” and cooperated with Ratzel's influential American devotee Ellen Churchill Semple. In his 1905 review of Semple's Geographical Interpretations of American History, Turner did not fail to comment on Ratzel's death and the German's importance for the study of American history:

Ratzel's work was inseparably connected to German imperialism. However, the US played such an important role in Ratzel's thought that his arguments were also readily absorbed on the other side of the Atlantic. During the 1890s the imperialist subtext of Ratzel's ideas was a perfect match for the frenzied American debate about the necessity of further “post-frontier” expansion. In Germany, on the other hand, Ratzel's analysis of the American frontier confirmed views of the US as a “normal” expansionist state. According to Ratzel and other contributors to German discussions about the United States, the American West was just one frontier region among many, albeit certainly the most impressive one.Footnote ³¹

Nineteenth-century Germany's most notorious proponent of overseas expansion, Carl Peters, was in complete agreement with Ratzel. Not only did he share the geographer's veneration for the United States, but he also espoused a similar kind of chauvinist liberalism. As a result, attempts to explain Peters and his imperialist aspirations by merely pointing towards his links to nationalist circles in late nineteenth-century Germany take too narrow a view. Peters celebrated independent entrepreneurialism, and criticized Imperial Germany's slow-working administration. Like Ratzel, he displayed genuine admiration for Anglo-American political institutions and the independent spirit of American frontiersmen. Again like Ratzel, he attempted to be active on behalf of the National Liberal Party when in 1895 he unsuccessfully ran for parliament as a national-liberal candidate. In addition, Peters believed his colonialist visions to be “liberal”: In his words, “liberal colonial politics” (liberale Kolonialpolitik) were indispensable for successful expansion.Footnote ³²

By the mid-1890s, Peters had become Germany's best-known colonial hero. However, in 1896 a number of parliamentary debates focused on the arbitrary killings of an African girl and boy that Peters had committed while residing near Mount Kilimanjaro in 1891 and 1892. In 1897, he fell hard. Peters was convicted of malfeasance in office and dismissed from colonial service. This sentence fueled Peters's disgust with the stifling workings of the German administrative system even further, which in turn resulted in his increased promotion of “American-style” laissez-faire colonialism. In an 1897 article he thus compared the failure of French colonialism in North America with the successes of the British and Americans. He chided the French for having attempted to control their American settlers too much, while their English-speaking neighbors had only received “one gift from their mother country,” namely that the settlers were left alone “as much as possible . . . a system of bureaucratic regimentation . . . does not lead to the creation of healthy and viable colonial startups. Instead, in order to achieve this goal, free and unfettered individual activities of the colonists are necessary.”Footnote ³³

The paradoxical conclusion of Peters's laissez-faire and entrepreneurial attitude towards colonialism was the abandonment of the colonial project:

Peters, maybe even more than Ratzel, therefore embraced a strong streak of liberal self-confidence, and he expected colonial expansion to allow him to freely express these individualist urges. For both men, German colonialism was never solely a state-sanctioned process geared only towards aggrandizing the German nation. It was that, too, but at its core colonialism was a liberal and individualist venture. During the first half of the nineteenth century, German liberals had looked to the United States as a political model for a united Germany. During the second half of the nineteenth century, America acquired another model dimension for German liberals as a liberal colonial empire.Footnote ³⁴

Because colonialism depended on an individualist entrepreneurial spirit, Peters believed that all successful colonies displayed similarly liberal characteristics regardless of their geographic location. North America, Africa, and Australia proved his point. Unsurprisingly, Peters also argued that the treatment of native populations in the world's successful colonies was similar. Answering an indictment of his cruel actions in Africa by the left-liberal Eugen Richter, Peters reasoned that natives were handled in comparable fashion worldwide:

Peters felt that the United States provided one of the best possible illustrations of his pro-colonialist argument. He thus proclaimed that there existed no alternative to liberale Kolonialpolitik (liberal colonial politics). Conveniently enough, the well-documented American cruelty against Indians, in his view an inevitable consequence of a laissez-faire administration that allowed settlers to deal with arising problems as they saw fit, also permitted him to put his own brutality against black Africans in perspective, thereby foreshadowing how some apologists of the brutal war in GSWA would use American examples ten years later. For Peters, America's triumphant rise to world-power status was simultaneously a triumph for liberal colonialism. In consequence, he argued that the kind of colonization policy that had led to the establishment of the United States as the most successful of all European colonial settlements should be used to “deduce the program for practical colonial policies for all times.”Footnote ³⁶

To be sure, in many ways Peters was an exception among German colonialists. He was neither a bureaucrat nor a member of the military, yet he was one of Germany's few colonial “heroes” with genuine and broad public appeal. As a result, Peters's fall in 1897 was problematic for the German colonial project as a whole. Despite his overall popularity, Peters also had a number of prominent political enemies in Germany, among them August Bebel, the chairman of the anticolonialist Social Democratic Party (SPD), and Eugen Richter, the leader of a small, left-liberal party, the Progressive People's Party (Freisinnige Volkspartei, hereafter FVP). In addition, he had opponents in the German colonial administration, and, although a fervent nationalist and expansionist, he also had enemies in the expansionist Pan-German League: he had criticized the League's rampant anti-Semitism.Footnote ³⁷

While Peters's dishonorable dismissal from colonial service in 1897 ruined his prospects of becoming governor of East Africa, public opinion began to change in his favor soon after the indictment. Peters's 1904 book England and the English sold around twenty thousand copies, much more than any of his pre-scandal publications. Moreover, in 1905, during the war in GSWA, fifty-one Reichstag deputies (among them Peters's friend Wilhelm von Kardorff of the Reichspartei or National Party, and also Franz von Arenberg from the moderate Center Party) tendered a request for Peters's exoneration. At the same time, only two Reichstag representatives openly criticized the brutal way Germany was fighting the rebels in South-West Africa: the Social Democrats August Bebel and Georg Ledebour. Emperor Wilhelm II was only too happy to oblige those petitioning for Peters's exculpation. The rehabilitation of “Hangman Peters” (a nickname given to Peters by SPD newspapers) thus occurred while far worse atrocities than he had ever committed were being perpetrated.Footnote ³⁸

INDIANS, AMERICAN EXPANSION, AND GERMAN SOUTH-WEST AFRICA

Warfare in South-West Africa followed a sequential pattern similar to genocides along the American frontier and in other areas of European colonial expansion. After the war's conclusion, the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung (German Colonial Times) drew open parallels between the conflict in “South-West” and measures taken against Amerindians along the American frontier. The Kolonialzeitung was the official paper of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Association), an expansionist lobbying organization in close alliance with the Pan-German League and the Naval League. Summarizing a speech given by Josef Lettenbaur, at the time German consul in Cincinnati, the Kolonialzeitung argued that the appeal of Lettenbaur's talk was grounded in his references to “American colonial history” and “America's experience with Indians.” The American example showed that “the submission of native peoples” was the precondition of colonization; only afterwards “the dove with the palm branch could appear and bring the blessings of civilization.”Footnote ³⁹

During the Herero and Nama uprisings, images of the American West became staple metaphors in public debates about German colonialism. Among the reasons for this rebellion were the ruthless behavior of German settlers and the exploitative practices of white merchants that increasingly resulted in the Hereros’ loss of their cattle, on which their livelihood depended. After a German lieutenant had made death threats against the Herero chief Samuel Maharero, in January of 1904 the Herero, who were eventually joined by the Nama, forced Germany to fight a costly war, which lasted until 1907. Initially, the small German protection force (Schutztruppe) was surprised by the course of events and 123 German soldiers and settlers were killed. Yet in August of 1904, General Lothar von Trotha encircled the Herero at the Waterberg. This battle resulted in thousands of casualties. Because all routes back to the Herero tribal lands were cut off, the survivors were driven towards the waterless Omaheke Desert, where most of them perished. On 2 October 1904, General Lothar von Trotha made his extermination strategy public by issuing an order that threatened the Herero with total annihilation. Emperor Wilhelm II (strongly influenced by Chancellor Bülow) compelled Trotha to rescind this order, but the end result of the war was mass murder nevertheless. In 1911, fifteen thousand Herero were still alive. Before the conflict, estimations ran as high as eighty thousand. The Nama did not fare much better. Their numbers were reduced by around 50 percent, from an estimated twenty thousand to less than ten thousand.Footnote ⁴⁰

In all, the German government deployed over 14,000 troops and spent over 585 million marks in colonial bonds. Next to the committed atrocities, it was therefore financial concerns that forced Germans to discuss both the necessity and the political nature of their colonial empire. This debate eventually culminated in the so-called “Hottentot Elections” of 1907. The elections resulted in an alliance of Chancellor Bülow's government with the ballot's winners, a coalition that consisted of Germany's liberal and conservative parties, all of which supported colonialism, and unequivocally backed the war in South-West Africa. Compared to the 1903 elections, over a million more Germans went to the polls in 1907. In 1907, colonialism was a topic that enabled especially liberals to fire up their base and to attract voters from segments of the population that before 1907 had refrained from voting in national elections. In fact, it was the two left-liberal parties, the FVP and the Liberal Association, that gained the most seats compared to the previous Reichstag elections.Footnote ⁴¹

The success of these pro-colonialist parties in January 1907 did not mean that the sentiments they embraced and promoted remained uncontested. Compared to 1903, the SPD actually gained about 250,000 votes in 1907. However, because of the first-past-the-post system and widespread gerrymandering, the SPD nevertheless lost almost half of their parliamentary seats. The SPD won 29 percent of all ballots cast and received only forty-three seats. In comparison, the moderate Catholic Center Party gained only 19.4 percent of the public vote and received 105 seats. The disparity between popular vote and Reichstag representation was even more glaring for the conservative parties. In other words, although greatly disadvantaged in the Reichstag, the voices of SPD parliamentarians represented the anticolonialist views embraced by the strongest political movement in Wilhelmine Germany. Social-democratic criticism of the German troops’ actions was direct and acerbic. August Bebel called the German military strategy “beastly” and warned of the “complete extermination” of the Hereros as early as March 1904. References to America were notably absent from the speeches of Bebel and Georg Ledebour (the SPD's other prominent speaker on colonial matters), however. Clearly, American examples lent themselves more easily to supporting the cause of those who defended German practices in GSWA. In the end, however, the SPD's relentless censure had little impact on German colonial policies, despite giving voice to strong anticolonial tendencies in German society. Often, members of the non-socialist factions (including more than once Center Party representative Matthias Erzberger) explicitly defended General von Trotha and agreed that as long as hostilities in GSWA had not ceased, criticism of either the German troops or their commanders was unpatriotic.Footnote ⁴²

Nevertheless, on 6 December 1904, Hermann Müller, who hailed from the Silesian town of Sagan and represented the left-liberal FVP, was expressly unsympathetic of the administrative measures undertaken in “South-West.” Yet the liberal Müller did not care at all about the same issues as the Social Democrats. Instead, he demanded to know why German colonial administrators had so far failed to build American-style reservations. He argued,

Müller “urgently” proposed the compilation of a report detailing how other nations and “the United States of America have proceeded and are proceeding in those of their lands that house foreign cultures.” Müller was obviously intrigued by the fact that reservations in America created areas of de facto racial separation of natives and whites.Footnote ⁴³

Müller was only one person in a long line of influential German liberals, both right- and left-wing, who advocated that Germany's colonial ventures should emulate American examples: Ratzel, Bernhard Dernburg, Gustav Schmoller (a progressive social reformer, well-known economist, and cofounder of the Action Committee for Colonial Politics, an inter-partisan association promoting the cause of German colonialism), Wilhelm Solf (the RKA's third state secretary, 1911–18), and the very racist Paul Rohrbach, came before and after him. Ratzel, Müller, and Rohrbach were especially taken with the exemplary potential of the American frontier, American westward expansion, and American Indian policies.Footnote ⁴⁴

This fact does not mean, however, that all of them drew the same lessons from American examples. Referring to Nazi imperialists during World War II, historian David Blackbourn notes, “To speak of Indians was to contemplate extermination.” Did the liberal and progressive proponents of German colonialism before 1914 – that is, those who referenced America the most – share this sentiment? Over the past ten years, a number of historians have revisited the positions on colonialism taken by German liberals during the early years of the twentieth century, among them Helmut Walser Smith, Erik Grimmer-Solem, and Andrew Zimmerman. All of them agree that German liberals, right- and left-leaning, eventually became deeply committed to German colonialism, and, according to Grimmer-Solem, “were also some of the most prominent advocates of violent and near genocidal treatment of native populations in German South-West Africa.” However, not all of those, liberal or otherwise, who referenced the American frontier and American Indian policies, advocated exterminatory practices in Germany's colonies. Instead, Germans applied US frontier lessons in the South-West African context much as American frontier enthusiasts used the myth of the “vanishing native” to explain the disappearance of Indians as a natural, automatic, and inevitable process without (white) human culprits.Footnote ⁴⁵

Oscar Wilhelm Stübel, the RKAb's director from 1900 to 1905, thus compared the Herero uprising to a natural disaster, implying that neither his office nor GSWA's administration was responsible for its occurrence. Dernburg followed his predecessor's lead. In his January 1907 speech on behalf of Schmoller's Action Committee, Dernburg referred to the United States as “the biggest colonial endeavor the world has ever known,” at the beginning of which stood “the complete annihilation of its native peoples.” Yet according to Dernburg, the natives’ “disappearance” could not have been avoided; at times, extinction was an inescapable fact of nature: “some native tribes have to vanish, just as some animals perish because of the impact of civilization.” Dernburg expressed regret over these developments, and was elated that the German colonies “were not too heavily burdened with such tribes,” meaning ethnic groups fated to become extinct. Yet from the way Dernburg portrayed the native peoples in Germany's colonies in January 1907, his listeners nevertheless had to deduce that at least some of these tribes were in fact destined “to vanish,” just as had happened along the American frontier.Footnote ⁴⁶

Dernburg gave this speech only a couple of days after conditions in the Shark Island concentration camp for interned Nama and Hereros near the city of Lüderitz in GSWA had reached their lowest point: in December 1906, 276 out of 1,464 incarcerated Nama had perished, a death rate of 18.9 percent. These deaths were clearly the result of the way the prisoners were provided for by German authorities, both military and civil, and Dernburg knew it. In order to publicly explain these terrible facts, he nevertheless utilized the premise of the “vanishing native,” which, in Dernburg's own words, was proven by the “complete annihilation” of America's Indians. That many Herero and Nama on Shark Island had died was “deeply regrettable,” but these deaths had occurred “because of the climate there . . . because of exhaustion . . . because of the war and its stresses and strains . . . because of a different and unfamiliar mode of life.” Dernburg never openly acknowledged any wrongdoing on the part of the German military, and stated in front of the Reichstag that “it is impossible to criticize the commander's action.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Despite these statements, Dernburg was not at all supportive of the brutal warfare practiced by German troops in GSWA. Once he had been named director of the RKAb, he immediately began to inquire into the conditions on Shark Island, and intervened. In April 1907 his actions led to a drastic improvement of the camp's living conditions. Dernburg also questioned local authorities as to why no efforts had been made to improve the situation earlier. So why in early 1907 did he resort to using the “vanishing Indian” premise in his speeches to audiences in Germany? One likely answer suggests itself. Dernburg was confronted with the atrocities German troops had committed (and were still committing) the moment he assumed office. He abhorred mindless brutality, but was an ardent believer in the German colonial project. He therefore wanted to quiet domestic criticism and most importantly the SPD's frequent acerbic attacks on the way the Herero and Nama were treated, so as to restore domestic faith in the viability of Germany's only settler colony.Footnote ⁴⁸

Acknowledging inhumane military practices in GSWA would have weakened the tenuous pro-colonialist, liberal–conservative alliance that had won the elections in 1907. In addition, it would have negatively affected Dernburg's own position within the administration, diminishing his chances to make good on the advance praise heaped upon him by the emperor and the German and international press. After all, Dernburg's appointment was supposed to symbolize a departure from Germany's so far largely unsuccessful Kolonialpolitik, especially in GSWA. In order to deflect public criticism, Dernburg thus used one of the most powerful rhetorical tools available to him: the “scientific fact” that America's Indians had “vanished” as a “natural” consequence of both the continent's initial colonization and subsequent US westward expansion. In all likelihood, Dernburg had his doubts whether the “vanishing native” premises actually applied to the Shark Island concentration camp. Yet because of the convincingness of American examples, and with the aim of building support for his agenda of a new kind of colonial politics – efficient, scientific, and ultimately more humane – he used them nonetheless. This interpretation of Dernburg's refusal to explicitly criticize the German military's actions in GSWA at least during his first months in office is underscored by his frank exchange with Trotha two years later. By 1909, Dernburg felt secure enough to denounce the social Darwinist ideas underwriting Trotha's extermination strategy and even engaged in a debate with the general covered in the Berliner Neueste Nachrichten, a Berlin daily.Footnote ⁴⁹

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that Dernburg's concerns were shared by all liberal colonial enthusiasts. Rohrbach, originally a trained theologian and one of the most popular colonial publicists of the left-liberal milieu in Germany before World War I, is a case in point. Rohrbach, who had occupied the post of settlement commissar for South-West Africa between 1903 and 1906, was willing to take comparisons of GSWA to the settlement of America in a different direction than had Dernburg and to implicitly accept the mass murder committed in this colony, at least after it had been committed.Footnote ⁵⁰

In his most popular book, The German Idea in the World, Rohrbach explained that circumstances in GSWA were unique within the German Empire. In most German colonies, “the native element will maintain its place next to the white one . . . because the African natives are adaptable to the European economy and similarly necessary.” In comparison, in America or Australia, “the economic integration of both Indians and Australians failed,” which in turn resulted in exterminatory measures: “settler administrations in New England offered official bounties for Indian scalps, regardless whether they came from men, women, or children.” In consequence, America “became entirely ‘white man's land’.” In Rohrbach's view, such exterminationist actions were impractical in all German colonies except for GSWA. There, very few “Bushmen” remained who “still give us troubles.” As a result, in South-West Africa the otherwise impractical Anglo-American examples of, as Rohrbach phrased it in 1912, “expulsion and extinction” provided a fitting intellectual framework.Footnote ⁵¹

Nevertheless, referencing the United States could have a wide array of intentions, reaching, in Rohrbach's case, from implicit post factum justifications of genocide to paternalistic concerns over the well-being of native populations. The conservative representative Reinhard Mumm thus argued for American-style reservations in order to protect and educate the colony's native tribes:

The American frontier was especially (and exclusively) relevant for GSWA. During the war years between 1904 and 1907, the German Colonial Association even financed a study trip to the American West for the civil engineer Alexander Kuhn. Kuhn was supposed to explore how German endeavors in GSWA could benefit from applying “civilizing” techniques used by Americans “in the West,” especially in Arizona. Once he had arrived, Kuhn felt that a comparison between “the situations of the natives here [in the US] and there [in South-West Africa] naturally presented itself. Not only that of the imported [sic] Negroes but especially that of the Indians, whose final prostration took a long series of bloody wars.” Kuhn argued that “the rearrangement of the situation of the Natives [in GSWA] will have to be tackled very soon.” In his view, American Indian reservations were exemplary and should be emulated in GSWA: “Even those of us who feel completely liberated from the German original sin of adoring everything foreign just because it is foreign nevertheless have much to learn from the measures the Americans have taken to solve the Native problem.”Footnote ⁵³

Likewise, the pro-colonialist (and anti-SPD) publications of Schmoller's Action Committee, most prominently the Guide to Colonial Politics (hereafter KF), argued that GSWA displayed the same initial teething problems as the young American colonies:

Theodor Leutwein, GSWA's governor from 1898 to 1905, who made his way from a conservative army background to one of Imperial Germany's top colonial offices, also utilized frontier imagery. For him, American examples served as effective illustrations demonstrating the suitability of South-West Africa for German settlement (Leutwein compared the colony to Nevada, Wyoming, and Colorado, and, like the KF, made references to colonial Virginia). In his memoirs, published in 1906, he argued that the war in GSWA had been caused by conditions that had also existed in the American West: “it is the same battle that once was fought by North American settlers.” Exonerating himself and his administration, Leutwein thus reinterpreted the origins of the war in South-West Africa against the backdrop of the American frontier. In his memoirs, the bloody conflict changed from being the consequence of specific German failures to being the inevitable result of (white) European expansion, whether in North America or elsewhere on the globe.Footnote ⁵⁵

Before 1914, one of the most attractive features of using the US as a model for colonization was therefore its appeal to various pro-colonialist groups. Left- and right-leaning liberals, as well as conservatives and nationalists, recognized the exemplary character of the US, especially regarding South-West Africa. This observation neither implies that America signified one and the same thing for anybody referencing it, nor that the US was the only point of orientation used in discussions of the war in GSWA. Yet bringing up America certainly helped to create and maintain common political ground between liberals and conservatives, before, during, and immediately after the national elections of 1907.